2. The primary meaning obviously is a man sitting and eating, kai. Though kai may mean other things too, for instance an eclipse of the moon (by cause of it being 'eaten'). However, in the glyph for full moon in the Mamari month calendar (Ca7-24)

the figure sitting eating in the upper part of the oval certainly does not mean eclipse. On the contrary, the moon is here seen in full. Instead, possibly, we should think kai = feast.

Though there is also a meaning of negation in kai and by a salto mortale we will then arrive at the opposite of eating and feast. Eating somebody (preferably an enemy) is indeed the total annihilation of him, a time for feast. Breaking his bones to get at the marrow too:

"If the moral attitudes of primitive man are hard for the Western mind to grasp and translate into familiar terms, there can hardly be one more so than the Maori notion of cooked food as the lowest thing, the furthest opposite to the sacred, in fact filthy.

For us to divest our minds of Christian notions of good and evil and substitute the concept of simple payment, harm for harm (or 'revenge', as we commonly call it with a misleading moral overtone), is simple enough - perhaps because every schoolchild has at some time known the latter in his horrid heart. Even the Maori custom of weeping over friends when they arrive instead of when they depart has a certain logic that is not beyond our comprehension.

But to enter, against all conditioning, into the minds of a people for whom cooked food and the act of eating could carry the overtones of meaning that we in our greater wisdom attach to their physical opposites and to sex, is a good deal harder. One has somehow to throw the mind into a state of being that is radically unlike ours. Yet if the trick can be done, a light comes on." (Maori Myths)

A negation at full moon is expressed in the name of the full moon night, Omotohi. It means that the period of 'sucking' (omo) is over (tohi). The moon child has grown enough, now she must be weaned. Next step is waning. The cycle must move on.